Why I like it so much: I put on Banana Pancakes of Jack Johnson and start cooking, it feels like holidays and it makes me think of a breakfast on a beach in Hawai. It’s my little happy place.

How I want to make it even better next time: Try to make a caramel with vanilla sugar to serve on top of the banana and pancakes, that should give a nice addition to the flavor of the banana.

What you need (around 10 pancakes depending on the size you want to bake)

2 bananas (the browner the better for the pancake mix, but keep one a bit young for the decorative part)
2 eggs
1tsp Vanilla Extract
Cinnamon
Coconut Oil or other cooking oil/butter1. Ripe the banane, cut in small slices and pour in a bowl.

2. Add the eggs in the bowl and whisk together. It’s better if you get a brown banana, because it will give more flavors and will be more easily mashed into the eggs.

3. Pre-heat a pan with some coconut oil and add the pancakes on the pan. Make sure to leave 2cm between each pancakes. Flip after 2minutes of cooking (when the face of the pancake is brownish it’s good!) and get it ready on a plate.

4. Take your second banana and slice it up. You can now use a flower shapped cutter (or any other shape you’d like) to put on top of your pancakes. It’s ready!

It’s not always easy to cook the dishes you like when you go living in another country where everything is different… It’s been 2 years now that I’ve been living in the Netherlands and I miss French food and the French recipes.

It’s sometimes a real challenge to find the ingredients I need, so I came up with this blog.

I chose to start by translating French recipes in English so that people can try them at home and replacing some ingredients with what you can find in here, so that everyone can enjoy a little bit of France with local products.

It’s also a way to share my food related discoveries with my friends and family. But surely, that’s also a way to celebrate the 2 years I’ve succeeded to live far from home.

What a better start than sharing with you a vegetable I never cooked before? I discovered and fell in love with it since I moved to the Netherlands… and that would be the pumpkin (potimarron in French, pompoen in Dutch). I just love its fruty taste so close to the one of chestnuts, that goes so well together with meat and mushrooms…

So I went looking for a recipe online and I found the original recipe on Audrey’s blog, feel free to have a look, she’s got amazing recipes (in French).

Why I like it so much: Pumpkin taste reminds me of the grilled chestnuts you can smell in the streets when shopping near the Galeries Lafayettes in Paris during Christmas time…

How I want to make it even better next time: I will swap the mushrooms and ham by chestnut mash and meat candied in maple confit.

What you need (4 persons)

1 kg of potimarron flesh
1 onion200 g of mushrooms
10 to 15 lasagna layers, number may vary depending on the dish you use
250 ml kookroom (that you’ll get at albert heijn, similar to 30cl of creme fraiche but good luck finding it in here).
6 thin slices of iberic ham
Salt, pepper
Nutmeg
Grated gouda
Butter

1.Wash the potimarron and cut the top of it. Dig inside with a spoon in order to get rid of all the seeds (keep the flesh to keep back inside of the potimarron when you’re done cleaning the seeds). You should get around 800g to 1kg of flesh to keep inside the vegetable. Put it in a glass dish that can get in the microwave oven, fill it in almost entirely (keep 1cm between the top of the dish and the level of water) and put on maximum heat for 15 minutes.

Your potimarron is ready as soon as you can cut through the flesh without problem with your knife.

2. Wash the onion and repeat the same process as for the potimarron. If you’ve got enough space in your dish, you might as well cook the them together.

3. In the meantime, pour the mushrooms in a pan with a bit of olive oil and fry for around 5 minutes until the water from the mushrooms is gone and there is no trace of olive oil any more.

4. When the vegetables are ready, get everything in a bowl and mix them with the kookroom (or crème fraîche). Add salt, pepper and a good pinch of nutmeg.

5. In a medium size dish that you would have buttered, alternate different layers as follows: firstly one lasagna layer, secondly some potimarron and onion mash, then the ham and a bit of mushrooms. Go on like this until you are getting to the final layer which will be lasagna and then purée on top to which you’ll add a layer of cheese (it’s better to keep some purée to put on top of your last lasagna layer or else it will burn).